The SeedsThe Life Story of a MatriarchLucy Griffith Paréwith the collaboration of her son Antoine Paré

The Seeds is a story Grand-mama told to my uncle Tony that he recorded and subsequently transcribed together with Antoinette Paré Glur, his daughter. One day when we went to ask Uncle Tony, who was a lawyer, to represent us in court against a group that we felt had reneged on a contract, he encouraged us to try to imagine how much negativity and wasted time would result from such an action and suggested that instead we take his manuscript home and see if we could publish it for him and the family. Desktop publishing was not far in the future and we had acquired an old A B Dick 326 offset printer that the professionals were abandoning and an Osborne portable computer, one of the first home computers, with no built-in memory and a 64k floppy disk capacity, in order to fulfill the contract that he wished us to abandon. We took the manuscript and together with him sent an appeal to all of his siblings to loan us their family albums so we could illustrate the book. Between editing text and sorting pictures, we lost our dining-room table for a year and converted a basement room into a print shop. In order to finance the costs of the project, Uncle Tony set up the Alphonse and Lucy-Griffith Paré Foundation, appealing to family members to donate. The foundation is very active and can be visited here. The Seeds was published in Sainte Lucie des Laurentides, QC, by Les Entreprises de L'Arpent Perdu Inc in co-operation with the Alphonse and Lucy Griffith Paré Foundation in 1984. That December, a book launch was held at Pierrefonds Manor, Pierrefonds, QC, with Lucy Griffith Paré in her 96th year.The link below will open the file in a readable, downloadable format.​Joseph Graham and Sheila Eskenazi